Naga Erotic

"Naga" is less a single people than a federation of hill communities — more than thirty named groups including the Angami, Ao, Konyak, Tangkhul, Lotha, Sema, Chakhesang, Phom, Wancho and Khiemnungan, each with its own language and territory. The unifying fact is the country: a stretch of steep, forested ridges along the India–Myanmar border, cut by river valleys and historically inaccessible enough that each ridge developed its own dialect, its own clan structure, its own variation on shared customs. Speakers belong to the Sino-Tibetan family, but two Naga villages a day's walk apart often cannot understand each other; Nagamese, an Assamese-based pidgin, evolved as the practical lingua franca, with English now serving the same role in churches, schools and government.

The conversion to Christianity is one of the most thorough religious shifts in modern Asia. American Baptist missionaries arrived in the nineteenth century, and today the great majority of Nagas are Christian — predominantly Baptist, with Catholic and Revivalist minorities — in a country that is overwhelmingly Hindu and Muslim. Sunday observance is near-total in Nagaland state. Older animist practice has not vanished so much as been folded into the cultural register: the festivals that punctuate the agricultural calendar — Hornbill, Sekrenyi, Moatsu, Aoleang — retain their pre-Christian shape even where the cosmology behind them has shifted.

The hallmark of traditional Naga society was the village republic. Each settlement was self-governing, fortified, and frequently at odds with its neighbors; headhunting, until its suppression in the early twentieth century, was bound up with male initiation, agricultural fertility and the prestige economy of the morung, the bachelors' dormitory where boys learned weaving, woodcarving and the oral history of their clan. The Konyak in particular kept the practice alive longest, and elderly tattooed men whose facial markings record taken heads are still alive in remote villages near the Myanmar line.

Politically, the Nagas have spent most of the post-independence era pressing for greater autonomy or outright sovereignty, a dispute that produced one of the longest-running insurgencies in South Asia and a 1997 ceasefire that remains in negotiation. The shawls — each pattern licensed to a specific clan, status or accomplishment — and the heavy brass and bead ornaments are not folkloric leftovers but active markers of who a person is and what they're entitled to wear.